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People Are Born In A Certain Place, And In A Certain Society. I Don't Mean To Sound Like A Determinist, But To Think We're Entirely Free To Do Whatever We Want Betrays A Certain Class Perspective. For Most People Who Have To Work For A Living, And Work At Jobs Under Conditions They May Not Like, It's Just Not Simple When It Comes To Freedom.

-Thomas Frank

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People Are Born In

Thomas Frank

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People Are Born In A Certain Place, And In A Certain Society. I Don't Mean To Sound Like A Determinist, But To Think We're Entirely Free To Do Whatever We Want Betrays A Certain Class Perspective. For Most People Who Have To Work For A Living, And Work At Jobs Under Conditions They May Not Like, It's Just Not Simple When It Comes To Freedom.

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Surrogate Motherhood Has Been The Subject Of Much Philosophical And Political Dispute Over The Years.

[the Right] May Never Bring Prayer Back To Schools, But It Has Rescued All Manner Of Rightwing Economic Nostrums From History's Dustbins. Having Rolled Back The Landmark Economic Reforms Of The Sixties (the War On Poverty) And Those Of The Thirties (labor Law, Agricultural Price Supports, Banking Regulation), Its Leaders Now Turn Their Guns On The Accomplishments Of The Earliest Years Of Progressivism (woodrow Wilson's Estate Tax; Theodore Roosevelt's Anti-trust Measures). With A Little More Effort, The Backlash May Well Repeal The Entire Twentieth Century.

In The Subprime Mortgage Industry, Bankers Handed Out Iffy Loans Like Candy At A Parade Because Such Loans Meant Revenue And, Hence, Bonuses For Executives In The Here-and-now.

Presidential Legacies Are Valuable Things, Too Valuable To Be Left Up To Historians.

Vote To Stand Tall Against Terrorists ; Receive Social Security Privatization . Vote To Strike A Blow Against Elitism; Receive A Social Order In Which Wealth Is More Concentrated Than Ever Before In Our Lifetimes , In Which Workers Have Been Stripped Of Power And Ceos Are Rewarded In A Manner Beyond Imagining.

Republicans Run The Machine When It's Their Turn, And Then Hand The Wheel Over To Democrats When The Public Has Had Enough.

Under The Administration Of George W. Bush, You Will Recall, Federal Spending Grew Pretty Significantly. At The Same Time, The Number Of People Directly Employed By The Federal Government Shrank. One Of The Factors That Explained The Difference Was Contracting.

Conservatism Is Not A Doctrine Of Contentment. Not A Doctrine For The Satisfied And The Smug. It's A Politics That's At War With The World.

People Getting Their Fundamental Interests Wrong Is What American Political Life Is All About.

Most Of Roosevelt's Innovations Have Been The Law Of The Land For 70 Years Now, And Yet We Are Still A Free Society Free Enough, That Is, To Allow Tens Of Thousands Of Protesters To Gather On The National Mall And To Broadcast Their Slogans And Speeches To The World Via C-span.

When The Entertainers Of The Right Aren’t Declaring Their Disgust With President Obama For Groveling Before Foreign Potentates, They’re Pretending To Fear Him As A Left-wing Thug, An Exemplar Of What They Call “the Chicago Way.”

During The Financial Crisis And Bailouts Of 2008, It Probably Occurred To Very Few Average People That We Were Entering A Period Of Hardship For Billionaires.

Joe Klein Is The Flower Of American Political Journalism, A Sharp Raconteur Who Shows Traces Of The Gonzo Style That Was In Vogue When He Was Honing His Craft At Rolling Stone Back In The Day.

The Revival Of The Right Is As Extraordinary As It Would Be If The Public Had Demanded Dozens Of New Nuclear Plants In The Days After The Three Mile Island Disaster; If We Had Reacted To Watergate By Making Richard Nixon A National Hero.

Americans Have Known About Mounting Inequality And King-sized Wall Street Bonuses For Years. But We Also Had An Entire Genre Of Journalism Dedicated To Brushing The Problem Off.

Is Wall Street The Rightful Master Of Our Economic Fate? Or Should We Choose A Broader Form Of Sovereignty?

Journalism Has A Special, Hallowed Place For Stories Of Its Practitioners' Persecution.

Massive Inequality, We Have Learned, Isn't The Best Way To Run An Economy After All. And When You Think About It, It's Also Profoundly Ugly.

Governing Was Always Difficult For Conservatives, But As They Return To The Opposition, They Are Rediscovering Their Skill At Blame Evasion.

When Done Right - Or Wrong, Depending On How You Look At It - Deficits Remove Liberal Options From The Table. Suddenly There's No Money For Building Bridges Or Inspecting Meat. Not Surprisingly, Running Up A Deficit Is A Strategy Favored By The Wrecking Crew For Its Liberal-killing Properties.

I Was In A Bad Mood When I Wrote That.

When Money Is Exchanged For Pregnancy, Some Believe, Surrogacy Comes Close To Organ-selling, Or Even Baby-selling.

Financial Regulation Is The Next Item On The Political Horizon, And It Doesn't Have To Be The Deathly Dull Wonk-battle That It Sounds Like. In Fact, If The Democrats Do Their Job, It Can Just As Easily Become A Platform For Addressing The Greatest Issues Of Them All.

Apparently, There Is No Bad Economic Turn A Conservative Cannot Do Unto His Buddy In The Working Class, As Long As Cultural Solidarity Has Been Cemented Over A Beer.

Yes, Democrats Can Prove That America Pays More For Health Care Than Other Countries; Yes, They Have Won The Dispute That Private Health Insurance Is Needlessly Expensive. But What They've Lost Is The Argument That We Are A Society.

What Is At Stake In The Debate Over Health Care Is More Than The Mere Crafting Of Policy. The Issue Is Now The Identity Of The Democratic Party.

Conservatives May Believe That Impoverished Borrowers Destroyed Wall Street. But We Liberals Will Not Fool Ourselves That Stupid Bankers Sank Conservatism For Good.

Government Is, By Its Very Nature, A Destroyer Of Liberties; The Obama Administration, Specifically, Is Promising To Interfere With The Economy And The Health Care System So Profoundly That Washington Will Soon Have Us All In Chains.

Every City Is Either Vibrant These Days Or Is Working On A Plan To Attain Vibrancy Soon. The Reason Is Simple: A City Isn't Successful - Isn't Even A City, Really - Unless It Can Lay Claim To Being 'vibrant.'

Our Laws Governing Lobbying And Campaign Contributions Have Struck The Right Balance Between The Wishes Of The People And Those Of Private Industry, So Why Are We So Quick To Doubt That The Same Great Results Can Be Achieved By Putting The Government's Justice-dealing Branch On The Same Market-based Course?

Whereas Liberals Are Thought To Erupt Self-righteously Whenever They Feel Like It, Conservatives Believe That They Themselves Are Never Permitted To Say What They Really Think.

One Of The Things I Keep Coming Back To In My Writing Is That Society Doesn't Work On This Mirror Principle - You Don't Have An Exact Replica On The Left Of What You Have On The Right. It Just Doesn't Work That Way.

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Acknowledging Class Was Always Difficult For 'new Democrats' - It Was Second-wave, It Was Divisive - But 2008 Made Retro Politics Cool Again.

Maybe That First, Gigantic Deficit The Reaganites Piled Up Was An Accident, Just A Combination Of Deluded 'supply Side' Tax Cuts And A Huge Bag Of Good Stuff For The Pentagon. But Pretty Quickly Conservatives Discovered That Deficits, When Done Correctly, Did Something Really Cool: Deficits Defunded The Left.

As You May Recall, Truman Was Extremely Unpopular When He Finally Left Washington In 1953, Thanks Largely To The Korean War. Today, However, He Is Thought To Have Been A Solidly Good President, A 'near Great' Even, In The Terminology Of Those Surveys Of Historians They Do Every Now And Then.

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Media Bias Has Been A Favorite Theme Of The Right For Decades, Of Course.

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It Is Always A Disappointment To Turn From Forthright Consideration Of Some Subject - Whether From The Left Or The Right, A Poet Or A Plumber - To The Beltway Version, In Which The Only Aspects Of The Issue That Matter Are The Effects It Will Have On The Fortunes Of The Two Parties And The Various Men In Power.

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Opinion Leaders

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There Is Much To Dislike About President Obama's Approach To The Financial Crisis. But Opposition, It Seems, Will Have To Come From Somewhere Other Than Conservatism. The Party Out Of Power Is Also A Party Out Of Touch.

In The Last James Bond Movie, The Villain Was A Culture Captain, A Tycoon Of Culture, A Murdoch Figure. It's Not As If People Don't Know What Is Going On.

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A Lot Of Populists After Populism Died Just Became Socialists. At The Beginning Of The 20th Century, Socialism Looked Like It Was Going To Take Off. It Didn't, Of Course, But A Lot Of People Thought It Was Going To.

The Thing Now Is To Seem Concerned In A Vaguely Social-democratic Way.

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I Was Never A Fan Of Barack Obama's Bipartisanship Routine.

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For-profit Higher Education Is Today A Booming Industry, Feeding On The Student Loans Handed Out To The Desperate.

If Your Purpose Is To Understand The Clique Of People Who Dominate Washington Today, The Emails That Really Matter Are The Ones Being Slowly Released By Wikileaks From The Hacked Account Of Hillary Clinton's Campaign Chair John Podesta.

When You Take Somebody's Quote Out Of Context, Which Happens All The Time, Nobody's Ever Going To Go And Do The Research On Their Own And Figure Out That You Got It Wrong.

These Days, Of Course, The Focus Of Talk About Popular Liberation Through Products Is Mostly Associated With The Internet. I've Been Collecting Computer Ads And Ads Dealing With Internet Industries.

Privatizing Bits Of The Prison Industry Was A Step In The Right Direction, But What We Didn't Have - Until Recently - Were Proper Instruments For Incentivizing The Judiciary. That's What The 'kids For Cash' Judges Were Apparently Experimenting With.

Promises To Get Beyond Partisanship Are The Most Perfunctory Sort Of Campaign Rhetoric, Almost As Empty As The Partisanship Itself.

Public Borrowing Is Costly These Days, True, But Interest Rates On Municipal Bonds Are Still Considerably Lower Than Those Borne By Corporate Debt.

There Is No Higher Claim To Journalistic Integrity Than Going To Jail To Protect A Source.

Mounting A Campaign Against Plutocracy Makes As Much Sense To The Typical Washington Liberal As Would Circulating A Petition Against Gravity. What Our Modernized Liberal Leaders Offer Is Not Confrontation But A Kind Of Therapy For Those Flattened By The Free-market Hurricane: They Counsel Us To Accept The Inevitability Of The Situation.

There Is Something Uniquely Depressing About The Fact That The National Portrait Gallery’s Version Of The Barack Obama “hope” Poster Previously Belonged To A Pair Of Lobbyists. Depressing Because Mr. Obama’s Washington Was Not Supposed To Be The Lobbyists’ Washington, The Place We Learned To Despise During The Last Administration.

What Becomes Fascinating Is The Way The Culture Industry Doesn't Deny It And Doesn't Try To Mitigate It, But Tries To Sell Its Products As A Way Of Liberating Oneself.

People Are Born In A Certain Place, And In A Certain Society. I Don't Mean To Sound Like A Determinist, But To Think We're Entirely Free To Do Whatever We Want Betrays A Certain Class Perspective. For Most People Who Have To Work For A Living, And Work At Jobs Under Conditions They May Not Like, It's Just Not Simple When It Comes To Freedom.

Above All Else Stands The Burning Question Of Bipartisanship. Whatever Else The Politicians Might Say They're About, Our News Analysts Know That This Is The True Object Of The Nation's Desire, The Topic To Which Those Slippery Presidential Spokesmen Need Always To Be Dragged Back.

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